Drayage, Union Labor and Power at the Orange County Convention Center: A Guide for European Exhibitors

If you have exhibited in Frankfurt, Barcelona or Birmingham and you are about to exhibit in Orlando, most of what you know will carry over. The stand still has to be designed, built, lit, staffed and taken down. What will not carry over is the machinery around it — a set of American show-floor conventions that are rarely explained to first-time exhibitors because everyone assumes you already know them.

This guide covers the three that cost people the most money and the most sleep: drayage, labour rules, and electrical power. It is written about the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, which is the second-largest convention centre in the United States — around 2.1 million square feet of exhibition space across the West Building and the North/South Building, at 9860 Universal Blvd — but the principles apply at most large US venues.

Drayage: the cost nobody budgets for

Drayage is the single most misunderstood line on an American trade show invoice, and it is usually the one that ruins a budget.

Here is what it is. When your freight arrives at the show, it does not go straight to your booth space. It is received at a marshalling yard or an advance warehouse, unloaded, checked in, stored, moved onto the show floor, and delivered to your stand. Your empty crates are then collected, stored somewhere off the floor for the duration of the show, and returned to you at breakdown. That whole chain of handling is drayage — also called material handling — and it is billed by the show's official contractor, not by the venue and not by your shipper.

Three things surprise European exhibitors every time:

• It is charged by weight, usually per hundredweight, with a minimum. A small, heavy crate can cost more to move fifty metres across a hall than it cost to fly from Europe.
• It is entirely separate from your shipping cost. Your freight forwarder's quote to get the crate to Orlando does not include getting it to your stand.
• It is charged on the way in and the empties are handled again on the way out.

There are two things that reduce it. The first is sending fewer and lighter crates. The second, and by far the larger, is not shipping a stand at all — if the structure is built in Orlando, the only things arriving by freight are your products and your literature, and the drayage bill shrinks to a fraction.

Advance warehouse or direct to show site?

You will be asked to choose, usually months ahead, and the choice has consequences.

Advance warehouse means your freight arrives at a warehouse weeks before the show, is stored, and is delivered to your booth for the start of move-in. It costs more per hundredweight. It is also far calmer: your goods are in the country, checked in, and known to be there, and they are usually in your space when you walk in.

Direct to show site means your freight arrives at the venue during a narrow, specified window on a specified day. It is cheaper. It is also unforgiving — miss the window, and you are waiting in a queue of trucks while your move-in time evaporates.

For a first US show, and particularly for anything crossing an ocean and a customs border to get there, the advance warehouse is usually worth the difference.

Union labour: what you can and cannot do yourself

This is the one that causes the most friction, because in much of Europe it is entirely normal for a company's own staff to build their own stand.

On American show floors, certain categories of work are performed by the show's labour, under the rules that show has agreed. Which categories, and how strictly, varies by venue, by contractor and by show — there is no single national rule, and anyone who tells you there is has not read enough exhibitor kits. Broadly, the work most often reserved covers significant installation and dismantle, rigging and anything overhead, electrical distribution under the floor, and the operation of powered equipment such as forklifts and lifts.

What exhibitors are commonly permitted to do themselves is unpack and set out their own products, arrange their own literature, and perform limited hand-assembly of their own display within defined limits of time and tools.

The rule that matters is the one in your show's exhibitor service kit, and it is published for every show. Read the labour section of that kit, or have your stand builder read it for you and tell you plainly what your own people may touch. The expensive mistake is not breaking a rule deliberately; it is arriving with three engineers who expected to build the stand themselves and discovering at eight in the morning that they may not.

Two practical points. Labour is ordered in advance at a lower rate than it is ordered on the day. And labour outside standard working hours — early mornings, evenings, weekends, holidays — is charged at overtime or double time, so the hour at which your move-in is scheduled has a direct effect on your bill.

Electrical power: 110V, and why your equipment may not like it

Standard mains power in the United States is nominally 120 volts at 60 hertz — usually referred to as 110V — against the 230V at 50 hertz that most of Europe runs on. Higher-power requirements are met with 208V or 480V three-phase service, which is not the same as European three-phase.

What this means in practice:

• A plug adapter is not a voltage converter. An adapter changes the shape of the pins. Equipment built for 230V single-voltage will not run correctly, and may be damaged, on US mains.
• Check the rating plate on every piece of equipment you intend to ship. Anything marked 100–240V, 50/60Hz will work with a plug adapter alone. Anything marked 230V only needs a transformer, or needs to be sourced locally.
• Motors and timing-sensitive equipment care about 50 versus 60 hertz even where the voltage is handled. A machine that runs at the wrong speed is a demonstration that does not work.
• Power is ordered in advance, by the outlet, and it is not free. You order a specific amperage to a specific location in your booth, and if that location is under the stand it has to be ordered before the flooring goes down. Ordering on-site costs substantially more than ordering by the deadline.
• Tell your stand builder your total load early, in watts or amps, including everything that will be switched on at once. Lighting, screens, LED Totems, product demonstrations and charging stations add up faster than people expect.

The simplest answer for anything that is not essential to ship: have it built or sourced in the United States. A stand fabricated in Orlando is wired to US standards from the first drawing, which removes the problem rather than managing it.

Customs and carnets, briefly

Goods entering the United States temporarily for an exhibition usually travel either under an ATA Carnet or as a temporary import handled by a customs broker. A carnet is a document that lets you bring goods in without paying duty, provided they leave again in the same condition — and provided every item on it is listed accurately, is present at both ends, and is stamped correctly on the way in and on the way out. A carnet that is filled in loosely or stamped incorrectly stops being a saving and becomes a liability.

It is worth saying plainly: a carnet is for things that come back. A stand structure that is built in Orlando, used in Orlando and stored in Orlando never needs one at all.

The shortest version of this guide

Almost every problem described above — drayage weight, a missed direct-to-site window, a 230V machine on a 110V floor, a carnet for a structure — comes from shipping a stand across an ocean to a country that builds them perfectly well itself.

Nordic Precision Exhibits exists to be the American end of that problem. We design, fabricate and print in our own 30,000 square foot Orlando facility, install and dismantle with our own crew at the Orange County Convention Center, and store your exhibit between shows. Your freight becomes your products and your people, which is what it should have been all along.

If you are planning a first United States show, tell us the show and the footprint and we will send a free 3D rendering and a written quotation, in feet and in square metres.